Ingmar Bergman

We live at the most interesting time in our cinematic history.

This is a masterpiece, a Bergman movie in which the actors are presumed dead before the credits roll.

An American, I hadn't realized how the notion of personal freedom had been sold so convincingly to the people, infecting such a great part of our national consciousness, that personal freedom could so easily triumph the slightest inkling of social responsibility.

Which is it? Home of the free and land of the brave ? Or Land of the free and home of the brave?

In painting, a true abstraction is acheived when the maker of it up can't tell up from down. Then the rich collector comes along with his entourage, which includes an art curator, a historian of sorts, to advise the collector that he must buy this painting, that it's a brilliant piece of art full of meaning that surely others will someday see but not before he's seen it first. And that when the others finally see what he's seen he'll be hailed as a visionary, a great leader in his own right.

The thought occurs: have we been following the wrong people? By this I mean, from the very beginning--Plato and Aristotle, and before that the pre-Socratics, and Heraclitus, Buddha, Jesus et.al .

We seem to have reached the point where we're led by people who either don't believe in anything at all or who believe in almost anything, and gleefully sell their beliefs to the highest bidders in bidding wars conducted behind closed doors.

Where did this production, this project of creating some sort of intelligent civilized polis, become so obtuse as to be almost unwatchable?

Yet the movie keeps unfolding right in front of our watery eyes, directed by a master who's decided to shoot it in black-and-white. He describes it as a historical fantasy set in Sweden during the Black Death. Tough stuff, dour, critics say it's 'depressing.' Surely there's something better on NetFlix or Amazon Prime.

Yeats' line, "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity" as soundtrack.

Operator of President's Twitter feed promoted. The New York Times, April 22, 2020. Photo by author.